loitering

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. August 8, 2013.* * *

Went for a walk in the forest with once and forever Winnipeg poet Tanis MacDonald and her friend Leena yesterday.

(I'll be interviewing Tanis about her The Daughter's Way: Canadian Women's Paternal Elegies for my Out of Town Authors series next week, speaking of which...)

I brought my camera but wasn't planning, necessarily, to take any pictures. But the pink mushrooms were out in full force and then there were other interesting specimens and then...so I made Tanis and Leena wait more than a few times.

My favourite moment of the walk came when I was squatting in the woods just off the main path, wanting to get pictures of this clump of Monotropa uniflora (also known as the ghost plant, Indian pipe, or corpse plant) and a dogwalker came up to Tanis, loitering to one side, and asked, "WHAT is she doing?"

It has been SUCH a good year for mushrooms and/or finding clumps of time to walk in said forest.